Kore o miba ikabakari ka to omoitsuru hito ni kawarite ne koso nakarure

English Translation

How he would have felt,
I thought, if he could have seen
these—and in his stead,
the one who is gone, I find
that I weep aloud for him.

Meaning

How much it would have meant to him, I thought, had he seen these; and in his place, the one who is gone, I find myself weeping aloud.

Commentary

Section 21 Tamesuke's Fifty Poems and the Replies to Them

Through the summer, letters stopped coming to a strange degree, and her uneasiness was more than ordinary. News that waves were rising on the shore of Shiga and that there were disturbances at the Mountain and at Miidera made her more anxious still. At last, on the second of the eighth month, a messenger arrived, and she gathered up and read the letters that had been accumulating from various people. From the young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, came fifty poems, sent down without even a fair copy made, saying that he had composed them. His poems had grown very fine. That eighteen of the fifty should have earned her mark seemed to her strange, and doubtless her parent's blind love was at fault. Among them she found one poem, and taking it to have been written out of thought for her under a traveller's sky, she was moved, and beside that poem, in small characters, she wrote an answer and sent it back. Beside another poem on the same travel topic she likewise added an answer. Then, at the end of the fifty, she wrote a note, setting down her general remarks on the poems, and at the very end she added a poem of her own.

Abutsu-ni was a consort of Fujiwara no Tameie and the mother of Tamesuke and Tamemori, living at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura. The young lord, the Jiju and Consultant, is her son Tamesuke, called the Jiju since the section of parting poems, who on the day of her departure answered her with "Tsui ni yomo ada ni wa naraji moshiogusa katami o miyo no ato ni nokoseba." This section takes an unusual form for an exchange: she marks his fifty poems, and writes her replies in small characters beside them. The one long gone, named in the poem at the end, is the dead Tameie, the person to whom she would above all have liked to show these fifty.

After the second day of the eighth month of Koan 3 (1280), at Tsukikage-no-yatsu in Kamakura, over the fifty poems that had come from the capital.

It is the poem she wrote at the very end of the fifty, after adding a note there and setting down her general remarks on the poems; it closes the section.

After it the prose goes on to say that thirty poems arrived from Tamesuke's younger brother Tamemori, with a request that she mark them and set down in detail whatever was poor.

A child's progress comes at last to the grief of having no one left to show it to. The demonstrative in the first line is the sheaf of fifty poems, and the clause is conditional. The second line asks how much it would have been, giving the degree without naming the feeling. The third line is attributive and governs the noun that follows. The person named in the fourth line is the dead Tameie, whom this diary consistently calls the one of old; to speak in his place is to say that the one who should most have rejoiced in these fifty is not there. In the closing line the noun means voice, and the phrase means to weep aloud; the verb carries the auxiliary of spontaneity, and an emphatic particle bound to it gives the sense that she cannot help weeping. The prose of the parting section had said, when the Jiju's grown-up reply arrived, that she wished the one long gone could have heard it and wept again; nearly a year later that same feeling takes the form of a poem here, and the section ends on the grief of a father who cannot be shown that his house's art is being carried on.

Author

Abutsu-ni

Source

Izayoi Nikki

Other